Hever

Well, this week starts travel season.

Maybe you'd say it started last weekend with Austria, but since the next five straight weekends will be spent out of the country, this feels like the real kickoff.

Starting the weekend of the 24th, we will spend 7 of 10 weekends travelling, seeing 21 cities in 7 countries. Since we had just gotten back from Austria, the weekend of the 18th was one of the few that we had no travel planned. But since the travel bug is here to stay we decided we couldn't stay in London!

Jenna has been reading a few historic fiction novels that cover the time period of King Henry VIII, and we're big fans of The Tudors which is about the same thing. So, Jenna was really wanting to make a trip down to Kent to see Hever Castle, where Anne Boleyn grew up. If you don't know, Anne was Henry's second wife, and the one for whom he basically turned his back on Rome and created the Church of England, which still exists today and is still led by the monarch. She was also the first of his wives to be executed, the thing that he is probably most famous for. If you haven't already, we would highly suggest doing some research on Henry, because his story is pretty interesting. And we found that all the little children over here know all about King Henry VIII and all of his wives.

Anyway, Hever is just a 45 minute train ride from London, so we took a quick day trip out to see it. We got to the Hever station and had a mile walk to get to the castle. We were smack dab in the middle of what you would imagine when someone says, "the English countryside". There were green rolling hills and beautiful gardens. We passed several farms filled with sheep and horses. It was actually a bit sunny out so we thoroughly enjoyed our walk to the castle.

We got to the castle and it was on a big piece of land filled with mazes, gardens, waterfalls and of course the castle. It had a double moat, complete with a drawbridge, that we don't think is in working order anymore. It was a smaller castle but we thought we could make a lovely home out of it!

We of course toured the castle and read all about it on the posted info inside. It was taken from the Boleyn family after their fall from grace, and ended up changing hands a few times, including going to one of Henry's other wives. Through the years it had several owners, but in the early 1900's it was bought by William Waldorf Astor (of the Waldorf-Astoria). He made many renovations, and basically got it completely updated and in the form it is today (gardens, sculptures, fountains, etc). To be honest, it is probably significantly different from when Anne was there, but it was cool none the less.

After touring the castle, we wandered some of the grounds and went through the hedge maze. Then we went to lunch to the cafe on the grounds. After lunch we did some more exploring. There were lots of beautiful gardens full of flowers. They had a rose garden that was not in bloom yet, but I am sure it will be gorgeous when it is.  There was a big lake that Anne Boleyn supposedly walked around, which we decided we could not pass up.

Luckily, we were both fit and adventurous, so we didn't have much trouble with these stairs:

We were lucky we had a beautiful sunny day and we enjoyed being outside. This was something that was on our list of "if we have time", but we ended up being very glad that we went. The grounds were beautiful, the weather was incredible, and we were just very happy that we decided to make the journey.